Family

'Hello Kitty' may become the battle cry of the robots BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

In the late 1980s I worked for a company whose receptionist was a blue-eyed blonde with the wide vowels and clipped consonants of a John Cheever housewife.

Julie wore Lily Pulitzer skirts, Pappagallo flats and satin headbands from Talbots. She was trim, tanned and tactful and filled out light pink While You Were Out slips in glorious Palmer penmanship. Though she had grown up in upstate New York, the daughter of a sheriff, Julie had the look of a Miss Porter's graduate who spent weekends at the Cosmo club. Every morning, she would fold a copy of the Washington Post into a tidy rectangle and time herself on the daily crossword, which she completed between answering phone calls. On a good day, she'd have the puzzle solved by 10 a.m.

Julie was, in other words, a low-paid, high-class, under-employed intellectual who answered phones, filed expense reports and changed the coffee filter from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily. Once upon a time, there were a lot of Julies, gracious, considerate sophisticates who welcomed you to the office every morning, inquiring about your weekend and complimenting you on your attire.

Today, there's "Hello Kitty."

Hello Kitty is one of the new robotic receptionists "employed" by a Japanese company that charges $424 a month to ask visitors to speak their names and tell them when the person they want to see is ready for them. Hello Kitty has 20,000 stored conversation patterns, including songs and riddles.

Then there's ALICE, a "virtual receptionist" manufactured by a Las Vegas company that is based on an interactive, touchscreen video panel much like the one you use to withdraw funds from your ATM. "When a customer walks into an ALICE-equipped business, motion sensors alert the company's employees, who can then turn on their video capabilities and answer the client's questions," reports the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Or there's the $10,000 QB Robot by Anybots Inc., a free-standing mobile robot that, the Boston Globe reports, many companies are using as a receptionist. Ava the robot (not to be confused with EVA the robot from "Wall-E"), is a 5-foot-4 assistant whose "head" is an iPad or Android tablet, which moves via motion sensors.

Eventually, Ava could progress beyond receptionist to nursemaid or cocktail waitress, dispensing pills or fetching cocktails, the New York Times reports.

"I like the idea that if you have a party, the robot can recognize faces, take drink orders, go back to the kitchen, load it up and then go back and find those people and deliver the drinks," Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation, told the Times. "I think that would be awesome."

What is it that we want from our interactions? Do we want an actual personal connection, the warmth of a stranger's smile, the polished courtesy of a human on the other side of a desk, or do we want a transaction?

Increasingly, businesses are deciding that what we want is a transaction. The Globe reports that many startup companies are relinquishing receptionists, reasoning that they look more frugal if they forgo the cost of a human and replace it with an informal, kiosk-like greeter. "In the start-up world," one architect told the newspaper, "you don't want to look like you're wasting money."

In March, David Brancacchio of NPR's Marketplace, reported on a trip he took across the country with a goal of having no human interaction whatsoever. Accompanied by four GPS devices, a robotic dog named Wilson and the robotic radio station Pandora, he slipped into Hyatt hotels via the hotel chain's kiosk, never having to deal with a human for 3,200 miles.

By the time he reached Tucumcari, N.M., he reported, he was "finding the interaction unfulfilling. "It ain't living," he wrote. "We talk about the personal connections enabled by texting, skyping, social media. But is this really where we're headed as technology increasingly invades all business and personal relationships?"

It may be. Increasingly, I find myself gravitating to the self-checkout aisle at the local grocery store, if only because I am often too tetchy to face another human being and I foolishly reason that I can check myself out faster than a done-in grocery clerk.

It's not an impulse I admire in myself, but society is making it easier for us malcontents to evade human contact entirely. So extensive do many organizations believe this misanthropy extends that many Internet organizations do not even employ people to answer their phones. And good luck if you can actually find the number that will plunge you into a phone tree maze.

I think about Julie the receptionist often when I visit offices that have all the warmth of a fallout shelter. I think of her gentle welcome mollifying me as I stormed into the office, her judicious inquiries reminding me that the world did not revolve around my travails.

Mostly, she reminded me that a gentle smile and a warm reception could actually change the texture of my day, a change that few robots could initiate.

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